Cripping Heterosexuality, Queering Able-Bodiedness: Murderball, Brokeback Mountain and the Contested Masculine Body

Abstract

Extending recent scholarship on the intersections between disability studies and queer theory, this article engages in a comparative reading of the films Murderball (dir. Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro) and Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee), both released in 2005. The popularity of these two particular films, the author suggests, demonstrates a powerful cultural backlash against those representational histories that have conflated feminization, male homosexuality, and disability. Both films successfully remasculinize their subjects, celebrating queerness and disability as the inevitable product of the hypermasculine body. But, ironically, the rhetoric of masculinity that these narratives share is also the source of their antagonism. The author argues that Murderball's `crip' critique of able-bodiedness relies on repeated heteromasculine performances, while Brokeback Mountain's queer hypermasculinity is deeply invested in an ethic of able-bodiedness. Thus a close reading of both films exposes masculinity as the visual mechanism through which disability and homosexuality are beginning to discipline one another on the contemporary cultural stage.